The Time of Hyperobjects

Morton has his abstract up for one of his 2012 RMMLA talks. I found this bit particularly provocative:

My paper will show how OOO is deeply congruent with ecology, since the ecological age is what I call the time of hyperobjects: the moment in which human beings realize that they are enmeshed in a series of entities such as climate (and global warming) and evolution (and the plenum of lifeforms). From here we can draw up a new ethical map that is neither utilitarian nor holistic—both systems fail in the face of hyperobjects, for reasons I shall outline. It is nonhuman (and even nonliving) entities that show us the way towards this new ethics. By “standing in the place of the death drive,” as psychoanalysis would put it, humans have the chance to coexist nonviolently with other beings. Indeed, this traumatic coexistence is a better reading of the Freudian death drive than one that presents it as a simple existential human drama.